So.
wieder wrote:On longturn.org no tech trade became popular after too many very good players teamed up, shared the techs and quickly became too advanced for the smaller alliances. This is the short version. Also, the tech upkeep didn't seem to be that good solution because on an alliance the other players could
instantly give back the tech(s) that were lost during the tc. It also gave an advantage to those who were able to be online at the tc.
Tech leakage has been used to compensate this and it has been working reasonably well.
Without tech trading every nation get the tech according to how well they play. Having no tech trading also allows new strategies to be used. For example, you can max trade for a while, build the infra and then switch back to max sci. You only need to know when this is the right call. In my opinion switching between different sci/tax rates adds to the game. Lots of players used to do max sci or max tax all the time when tech trading was possible.
wieder wrote:I don't believe it's only about scoring system. If you want to do well in the game, you need techs and tech trading is a effective way of getting them for free. By free I mean without actual bulb cost. Without tech trading, everyone wanting to get tech A costing 100 bulbs, needs to spend 100 bulbs (or less with tech leakage) to get the tech. With tech trading only one player needs to spend the bulbs and the tech can be duplicated to everyone in the alliance. It's like printing money but without the inflation if the techs are not given to everyone.
It's more about becoming more advanced than some other players. I see no reason why not try to do that regardless of the scoring system, winning conditions or any other setup. All the saved resources can be used for other purposes and that definitely speeds up the game.
Of course, if specialized nations is what you are looking for, tech trading is the way to go.
If giving back lost techs every turn is the only problem, it can be fixed. Set:
- tech upkeep based on number of cities so that you can't be in an industrial era without every city having a library, or else you lose tech,a nd also to give a slight catch up boost to smaller nations
- 50% chance of tech lost when receiving.
- 5% chance of tech lost while giving.
- tech leak so that people who are behind can also catch up
- or, even better, I don't know if there are options that make you lose bulbs when receiving or giving technology use that, instead of CHANCE to lose whole techs. That would be more neat.
- every tech should have a root_requirement (or whatever it's called) so that, when you lose tech, you don't lose Bronze that you're not using anymore, but something current, expensive and useful
This way it's more efficient to reduce tech transfer to a minimum, but it will still happen when someone really needs a technology and when you want to give your allies the edge. It also forces them to expend bulbs because, if they rely on patching up by their allies, it will backfire sooner or later; alliance whose members all have good technological infrastructure will lose far less techs and bulbs than the one whose members are specialised to Sci-only and Tax-only.
And, again, as someone said, tech trade may be unbalancing. However:
- that's life, deal with it; it's more realistic for a large alliance to be ahead than not
- balance in a game like Civ is an unreachable abstract
- balance in multiplayer game is an unreachable abstract